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But the celebration didn’t last long. The odds of the Senate taking similar action any time soon were always long. Now, given the health care quagmire, these odds are even longer.

And the clock is ticking. Under the regulation requiring this CEO-worker pay ratio disclosure, large publicly held corporations are due to start reporting their numbers in 2018.

What about non-legislative action? The regulation, which arose out of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, certainly has plenty of enemies outside the halls of Congress.

One of the most ardent is SEC Commissioner Michael Piwowar, who gets downright apoplectic when speaking about the horrendous burden this “useless” and “special interest-motivated” regulation imposes on corporations — corporations that apparently don’t have the foggiest idea how much they pay their own workers (publicly held firms already report the CEO side of the ratio equation).

When asked about the issue at a July 17 Heritage Foundation event broadcast on C-Span, Piwowar said “first best” would be Congressional repeal — in fact, he exclaimed, that would be “fantastic!” But in this interview and in a speech a few weeks earlier to the Society on Corporate Governance, Piwowar suggested that regulatory actions to delay or water down the regulation might also be possible, depending on how the public weighs in on the question of costs and benefits.

What Piwowar failed to mention is that the jury came in on that question years ago. Before the SEC finalized the regulation in 2015, the agency received more than 287,400 public comment letters, the vast majority of which were strongly in favor of the rule. Supporters included four state officials responsible for their state pension funds, more than two dozen institutional investors and investment managers, including CalPERS (manager of the largest U.S. pension fund), Trillium, Domini, and Walden Asset Management, as well as the Council of Institutional Investors. They all made the general argument that extreme pay gaps are both unfair and bad for business.

But Piwowar is not one to be dissuaded by such a deluge. This past February, he used his authority as the SEC’s acting chair to “re-open” public comment on pay ratio disclosure. Specifically, he asked for “input on any unexpected challenges” that corporations have experienced in calculating their ratio and “whether relief is needed.”

Piwowar got comments aplenty — just not the kind he was looking for. Even as the country was experiencing a period of political “shock and awe” in the first days of the Trump administration, more than 14,240 individuals and organizations still took time to submit letters on what should be a straightforward transparency issue. According to the legal news site JD Supra, only 30 of these letters expressed opposition to the regulation. Even fewer bothered to try to cite any “unexpected challenges” with compliance.

And so Piwowar’s dogged hunt for ammunition continues. Even though his initial public comment deadline passed months ago, he said in his recent conference remarks that he’d continue to welcome submissions about how difficult it is to calculate median worker pay. And at the Heritage Foundation, he tossed out the possibility of using this information to justify the use of “exemptive authority” to narrow the scope of the regulation (small firms are already exempted).

He and other defenders of overpaid CEOs have reason for angst. A recent Washington Post article pointed out that even if Piwowar decides to push for an SEC vote to delay the rule, he might have to wait until at least one of the two current vacancies on the Commission is filled. Three Commissioners are needed for a quorum and the current Democratic appointee could scuttle votes by merely not showing up. President Trump did submit an SEC nomination recently, but it needs to be confirmed by the Senate and well, you know, quagmire.

In the meantime, there are growing signs that the pay ratio train has left the station. Even Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Wilmot has weighed in favorably, suggesting the information might be useful in flagging investment risks such as those that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Perhaps out of desperation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying out new and different arguments against the regulation, beyond the usual “burdensome” line. In July 18 testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Financial Services, Thomas Quaadman, a Chamber Executive Vice President, railed against a new policy in Portland, Oregon to apply a small surtax on corporations that pay their CEOs more than 100 times their median worker pay. Lawmakers in five states are considering similar bills.

“These taxes are a development that was never considered by Congress or the SEC when Dodd-Frank was passed,” Quaadman noted. And this, he claimed, justified “the Chamber’s longstanding position that the pay ratio rule was never about providing material information to investors.”

Following this perverse logic, the SEC should be prohibited from requiring disclosure of any information that may some day in the future be used for purposes other than investor analysis.

As the anti-disclosure zealots continue their struggle, most executive compensation consultants and legal experts are operating under the assumption that pay ratio disclosure will live to see the light of day.

David Wise, a senior client partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group, told Washington Post reporter Jena McGregor that back in January he thought repeal was a “no brainer,” but now, “the betting man in me says this will be in place next year, only because of the traffic in the queue. You’ve got some big, big trucks in front of you.”

In other words, it’s time for the corporations that have resisted this transparency reform to pull out their calculators.

Reuters is reporting that Donald Trump is considering ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for the post of Secretary of State.

As someone who’s been analyzing CEO pay for more than 20 years, I feel like I know these guys. So I couldn’t resist pulling out excerpts from two of our annual Executive Excess reports in which Raymond and Tillerson played starring roles. First, in 2006, our report zeroed in on the CEOs who were profiting from the war in Iraq. Lee Raymond, as the outgoing CEO of ExxonMobil, was cashing in big-time on war-related oil price volatility, something he readily admitted he had no control over. While ordinary Americans were feeling “pain at the pump,” high oil prices had sent the value of his pay package soaring. Here’s the timely excerpt:

Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil CEO, 1999-2005:

In 2005, ExxonMobil collected $ 36 billion in profit, the grandest annual profit total ever recorded anywhere. Last November, called before Congress to explain the rising gas prices that appear to have fueled these record profits, ExxonMobil’s Lee Raymond explained that rising prices reflect global supply and demand, nothing more.

“We are all,” Raymond assured Congress, “in this together, everywhere in the world.”

We’re all in this together, except Raymond. As ExxonMobil CEO in 2005, his basic salary alone ran 63 times the average paycheck in the oil industry. Raymond’s $ 4 million salary last year amounted to a weekly take-home of $ 83,333.

But Raymond hardly had to content himself with just salary in 2005. His overall pay for the year totaled $ 69,684,030.

Raymond retired from ExxonMobil at the end of 2005, and his near $ 70 million in compensation for the year seemed, at the time, a more than ample reward for his career of service to company shareholders. Company directors disagreed. This past April, news reports revealed that Raymond walked off into the retirement sunset with a going-away pay package that sets a staggeringly new golden parachute standard.

This retirement package — a grab-bag of stock options, restricted stock awards from previous years, retirement-independent salary, and bonuses, plus a $ 1 million consulting contract, security services, a car and driver, access to the company corporate jet, and $ 210,800 in country club fees — would add up to nearly $ 400 million.

“He is a porker of the first order,” executive pay expert Graef Crystal told Bloomberg after the news of Raymond’s good fortune broke. “Those CEOs out there who are doing better at the trough must be thrilled he’s flying fighter cover for them.”

Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO, 2006-present:

And now on to ExxonMobil’s current CEO, Rex Tillerson. In 2015, our Executive Excess report was the first to analyze how CEO pay practices are rewarding corporate leaders for accelerating climate change. The report documented, for example, how oil executive bonuses encourage behaviors that further lock their companies into fossil fuel dependency instead of diversifying into renewables.

At ExxonMobil, the company’s proxy statement cited successful drilling in “the first ExxonMobil-Rosneft Joint Venture Kara Sea exploration well in the Russian Arctic” among the reasons for awarding high executive payouts in 2014. The Russian government-owned Rosneft has a dismal environmental, safety, and transparency record, according to Greenpeace. Within months of the ExxonMobil bonus awards, international sanctions against Russia led to the scrapping of this controversial joint venture.

Here’s more from that report about Tillerson:

A regular on lists of America’s highest-paid corporate executives, Rex Tillerson pocketed $ 33 million in 2014, raising his total compensation over the past five years to $ 165 million. His gargantuan reward package doesn’t just reflect the massive size of his firm, the nation’s second-largest. As detailed later in this report, ExxonMobil aggressively uses stock repurchases to boost share prices, a move that in turn inflates Tillerson’s equity-based pay. Between 2003 and 2013, buybacks accounted for an estimated 51 percent of ExxonMobil earnings per share growth. As of year-end 2014, Tillerson, who became ExxonMobil chair and CEO in 2006, was sitting on more than $ 166 million worth of unvested stock grants.

In the midst of all this share repurchasing, ExxonMobil has also been spending generously to support climate deniers. In the 2014 election cycle, ExxonMobil’s PAC dished out $ 715,000 in campaign contributions to candidates who have either denied or raised questions about climate science. ExxonMobil, adds the Union of Concerned Scientists, also continues to quietly fund climate denial organizations.

Shareholders have pushed hard for change at ExxonMobil. They’ve introduced 62 climate-related resolutions over the past 25 years. Management has opposed every one. CEO Tillerson, ironically, has little tolerance for environment-threatening behavior in his own backyard. Last year, his efforts to block a fracking project in his posh Dallas suburb made the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

In a follow-up article in AlterNet, I noted that when a Catholic priest and shareholder activist urged investment in renewables at the company’s annual meeting in 2015, Tillerson openly mocked him.

I know I should add something thoughtful here about how Tillerson or Raymond might perform as our nation’s top diplomat, including in global climate negotiations and international efforts to fight global poverty. Sorry, I’ve got nothing to say.

You may already think most — if not all — CEOs of major U.S. companies fully qualify as overpaid. But who among them rate as the most overpaid?

The shareholder advocacy group As You Sow has just released a list of the 100 S&P 500 CEOs the group sees as the most deserving of this distinction.

Topping the list: Anthony Petrello of the oil drilling company Nabors Industries.

Shareholders at Nabors, As You Sow’s heavily researched 40-page report details, suffered net losses of nearly 21 percent during the period 2009-2013 — and yet Petrello saw a 2013 payout of $ 68.2 million. The firm earned additional demerits for giving Petrello massive bonuses not conditioned on company performance.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nabors Industries ranks as one of only two companies whose shareholders have voted down executive pay packages four years in a row. But since such “say on pay” votes are only advisory, the Nabors board went ahead and doled out the dough anyway.

“The pay packages analyzed in this report are from the companies that the majority of retirement funds are invested in,” Landis Weaver points out. “If someone has a 401(k) through their employer, it’s likely they are invested in a company with an overpaid CEO.”

Let’s hope As You Sow makes the top 100 overpaid CEO list an annual exercise in shaming the worst offenders of executive excess.